Devices for playback of multimedia content retrieved from a pre-recorded exchangeable storage medium, which is today usually an optical disc, may provide the ability to store additional content pertaining to a specific exchangeable storage medium. An example is a DVD player with integrated hard disc drive (HDD). Additional content can be downloaded from the Internet or retrieved from another exchangeable storage medium in order to upgrade the content, even after a customer has acquired a pre-recorded disc. Examples for such additional content are bonus tracks, subtitles in specific languages, advertisement trailer updates or games related to a movie. Such functionality usually requires a relatively expensive fully programmable device platform, e.g. a set of Java™ programs such as Java 2 MicroEdition (J2ME).
A playback system that contains such a completely programmable environment can detect additional content items and visualize them in the user interface by Java™ programs that can both be pre-authored at disc creation time or downloaded together with the bonus content items.
Today's multimedia storage systems allow mainly for audio, video, still images, graphical and control information as part of the multimedia content. Typically, a storage medium also contains a menu that is presented to the user on screen and that consists of a graphical layout comprising still images, audio and possibly video information. Such menus feature buttons or “hot spots” that can be navigated to and selected by the user through a remote control. The action to be taken when a menu button is pressed may be part of said control information. In current DVD player devices the mentioned functionality is realized by device firmware and the control information cannot be adapted to additional content either by the content author or the user of the device.
The existence and nature of the additional content that is added to the overall presentation is usually not known at the time when a pre-recorded storage medium is authored. Later, additional content items may be available for playback and must be navigated to by the user with a menu. For presenting these additional content items in a menu to the user anyway, known solutions are based on downloading both additional content and a complete menu, including the additional content items.
Further, menus for PC software often use visible but inactive, so-called “greyed-out” buttons that become active as soon as the associated content item is available. In this case the appearance and location of the respective button is predefined.